Multicolored strands of lights twinkled from every surface around the dining room of the Big Texan Steak Ranch, even from the antlers of mounted deer heads and the ears of one embarrassed-looking coyote. Only the buffalo head maintained its dignity. Well, he and the giant fiberglass Santa guarding the exit door. I’d wanted to come here ever since my rodeo-cowboy father ran off before my promised seventeenth-birthday dinner, but, in light of the news I’d just received, all of the decorations were suddenly a little too much. I cradled my iPhone between my ear and shoulder, one hand clutching the neck of my poncho and the other slinging my purse straps over my other shoulder.
“Come on,” I whispered to Jack, my boss—a man who can’t figure out if he’s a southern New Mexico rancher or a West Texas criminal defense attorney. Throw in the fact that he is mysterious, wounded, and part Apache, and you can probably see why half the women and nearly that many men in both locales had him starring in their own dreamland versions of Fifty Shades of Grey. Not me, though. In my dreams, he starred with me in The Notebook.
One eyebrow shot toward his hairline, and he answered at a normal decibel. “But we’re celebrating, and our food hasn’t come yet.” The celebration was for my graduation from the foster-parenting classes I’d been taking for the last two months. “And I really need to talk to you about something.”
In my ear, Child Protective Services investigator Wallace Gray answered. “Hello, Emily. I’d almost given up on you.”
“I just saw your texts.”
They’d come in a flurry, so by the time I’d read them, the whole story scrolled before my eyes. Two teens living in a CPS group home, Greg and Farrah, had run away and were reported as soliciting rides at Love’s Travel Stop, not ten minutes from where I now stood glaring at Jack. Love’s was a cross-country trucker mecca, situated right off I-40 outside Amarillo. The kids were likely to get more than the kind of ride they intended from the type of person who’d pick up runaways.
“I thought you’d want to know,” he said. Wallace and I had taken a special interest in the pair recently when we accidentally rousted them from an abandoned house while looking for a missing girl. They’d run away from us then, too.
“Definitely. Thanks.”
“Their caseworker is picking me up in ten minutes.”
“Who is it?”
“Byron Philly. I don’t think you’ve met him.”
“Uh-uh.”
“I need help. We can’t get there for half an hour. Any chance you can get there sooner, see if you could find them?”
I didn’t like the thought of Greg and Farrah out there in the cold. “We can be there in ten.”
“We?”
“I’m with Jack.”
“I hope you mean with Jack, and not just with him, if you know what I mean.”
I knew, but after one incredible-if-tipsy make-out session that seemed to be going somewhere, I had blown it with Jack, who didn’t seem big on second chances. As for me, my oops-I-prefer-men-who-dress-as-women husband, Rich, wasn’t officially an ex yet. Any day now, though.
A waitress sashayed up to our table. From her diminutive size, she couldn’t possibly eat here much, at least not the famous 72-ounce steak dinner. She popped a tray stand into place with her hip in a strangely provocative way, then balanced a load of food on it. Jack pretended to be staring at his phone instead of her tush. Her hands now free, she tossed a long braid behind her shoulder and turned to us with an electric smile, flashing a mouthful of metal.
“Who’s rare and who’s”—she glanced back at the tray again and frowned, as if still in disbelief—“grilled beefsteak tomatoes?”
Being a vegetarian in the cattle capital of the universe isn’t easy. I put my hand over the mouthpiece of my iPhone. “To go. Check, please.” Then, into the phone: “See you soon.” I hung up.
Her brown eyes made Os, but she pulled out a handheld waiter pad and tapped a few keystrokes. “Your bill will be here in a moment.” She smiled again. “Y’all come back, now, when you’ve got more time to enjoy your dinner.”
Jack sighed, long and vibrato, and pulled out his wallet.
The trip in the dark along the I-40 access road to Love’s only took us five minutes because I had stuck out my hand for Jack’s keys when we got to his Jeep Wrangler—a monstrosity of patchworked panels in colors neither nature nor the automobile industry had designed to be used together—and Jack had obliged. I turned the Jeep into the yellow, red, and orange rainbow of the Love’s compound, and it jounced and splashed in brown melted snow from earlier in the day. New flakes were beginning to fall, though, and it would soon be a blanket of white once again. I eased the Jeep across the apron of concrete past the noncommercial pumps and store, and onward toward the big-rig pumps and acres of overnight truck parking.
I glided to a stop. “Where do you think we should look?” I asked.
“I wasn’t aware you cared what I thought. You know, since you basically kidnapped me from my dinner.”
I threw him a side-eye look, but I smiled. “Can you please help me find the kids?”
“It takes a little longer than a quarter of an hour for a prisoner to develop Stockholm syndrome.” From my peripheral vision, I saw his one dimple indent for a nanosecond.
The man had a quick wit, I’d give him that, even if he rarely answered a question head on. “Thank you for the psychology lesson, Patty Hearst.” I let off the brake and we crept forward, salt crunching under the Jeep’s slow-rolling tires. “Okay, they’re trying to hitch a ride out of town, so they’ll be watching the truckers, but they won’t want to be seen.” I scanned the three sides I could see of the store. Nada. Not even Christmas decorations. Maybe Love’s didn’t celebrate the season.
“A lot of activity here for a Wednesday night.” Jack was referring to the fact that Amarillo basically shut down on Wednesday nights for midweek church services.
“I doubt that long-haul truckers go to Wednesday night church on the road.”
Big rigs were lined up at the pumps and covered all of the lot I could see. Engines rumbled, and dark gray diesel exhaust escaped the dual chrome pipes on each side of one truck’s cab, like puffs of smoke rings from the end of a cigarette. The sooty heaviness of it made me feel dirty.
Searching for the two teenagers catapulted me back to my own childhood for a moment. When I was young, my father had encouraged my obsessive love of all things Native American by teaching me to scout like an Indian. “A real scout gets close to the land,” he would say, as we’d get out of the car. “He tests for scents.” We’d sniff together. “He touches the earth.” Together, we’d lean down and run our fingers across dirt or grass. “That’s it, my little Sacajawea,” he’d say, and throw me up onto his shoulders for a ride.
Twenty-plus years later, I rolled my window down, and my hand itched to open the door, to get close to the earth, sniff it, and touch it, but I didn’t do it. Cold air bit my exposed skin. I pinched my poncho together high on my neck as a tight popping noise resounded from somewhere in the truck lot. Jack and I met eyes during a long silence, then three more pops blasted through the air in rapid succession.
“Backfiring truck?” I asked, even though I didn’t think it was.
“Possibly yes, but probably gunshots.”
And Greg and Farrah were out there somewhere. “We’d better check it out.”
I accelerated past the truck pumps and into the relative darkness of the parking area. I skirted the outside edge, and we peered down the rows. One after another revealed nothing but cabs with blackout curtains and hulking trailers with personality mud flaps—Dallas Cowboys, Yosemite Sam, the ubiquitous posing nude woman. I turned down the side of the lot farthest from I-40. Shadowy figures darted from between two rows halfway across the lot and into the field on the other side. One looked taller than the other, and they appeared to be holding hands.
“There they are!” I floored the Jeep, and we rocketed over the lot, gaining speed rapidly.
A tire hit a pothole and jarred us so hard I worried we’d broken an axle, but the Jeep kept charging forward. When we reached the spot where the two people had disappeared, I turned sharply to the left. Lighted asphalt gave way to dark field, and we bounced over clumps of prairie grass and God knew what else. Jack braced himself with one hand on the ceiling and one on his door’s armrest. The snow hadn’t melted out here, but it wasn’t deep, and the Jeep smashed through its half-icy crust.
“I can’t see anything. Can you pan the headlights?” Jack said.
I slowed and turned first to the left for twenty yards, then drove in a huge circle. When I judged that we’d completed a loop back roughly to where we’d started, I turned to the right to continue across the field.
Wham—crunch! The Jeep slammed into something immoveable. My head bounced off the steering wheel, and I bit my tongue, hard. Warm, coppery fluid oozed into my mouth.
“Mother Goose!” I yelled. “Are you okay?”
An enormous deflating airbag muffled Jack’s response.
“What?”
The bag fell away. “I said, ‘Other than I can’t breathe.’”
“Oh.” I pounded the steering wheel with one fist. “We lost them, and I wrecked your Jeep.” I turned to him. “I’m so sorry.”
He pushed the limp airbag off his legs. “I’m sorry your airbag didn’t deploy.” He turned to me and covered up what sounded suspiciously like a laugh with a cough. “You look like Count Chocula.”
I turned the rearview mirror to me and saw the blood trickles out of each corner of my mouth. I almost laughed, too. He reached over and wiped the blood from beside my lip, and the heat from his thumb seared my skin. I gasped, and he jumped back.
The inside of the Jeep sizzled and popped with electricity as we stared at each other. Then he broke eye contact and fumbled for a flashlight from the glove box and opened his door. I put my fingers to my throat. They bore witness to the slowing of my jackrabbit heartbeat.
“I’ll go assess the damage.” Jack jumped out, leaving his door ajar.
I shivered, cold from more than his sudden absence. It was snowing harder now, and—this being the coldest and snowiest winter in one hundred years in Amarillo—of course the wind was blowing it straight sideways at what felt like a bajillion miles per hour, right through Jack’s open door. Flakes dappled his empty seat, closer and closer together. People had died of hypothermia in warmer conditions than this. The heater was already on high. I leaned over and shut his door, or slammed it, rather, then put my cheek on the steering wheel and looked out the side window into the night, shivering.
A white face under a black knit cap appeared like a specter outside the window. I screamed before I could stop myself. It was the young man we’d been chasing. Greg. I rolled down my window.
“Hey,” he said. “I know you.”
“Yes, you do, Greg. I’m Emily. We met when you were squatting in that deserted house by Llano Cemetery. Where’s Farrah?”
A female face with one brown and one green eye framed by pixie-short black hair materialized from the darkness behind him, her body blending with the night. “Are you hurt?” The girl pointed at my bloody face.
I used the back of my hand to wipe some of it away. I glanced at my hand. Now I had smears of blood across it. “No, I’m fine. My friend is seeing if our Jeep is, though.”
“It’s not,” she said.
“Your front end is, like, wasted,” he said.
Ugh. And here I was trying to scrounge up enough money to get a place of my own—as in, not with my mother. “You guys have created a bit of excitement tonight.”
Greg harrumphed. “Maybe.”
“How would you describe it, then?”
“I’m not going to let the same thing happen to Farrah twice.”
“What do you mean?”
Farrah put her hand on Greg’s upper arm. “It’s okay.”
He shook his head. “It’s not. No one believes us about what that, that”—he threw up his hands—“monster did to you.” He glared at me. “He should be in jail. Why do they take his word against hers?”
I knew that Farrah claimed she’d been sexually abused, that CPS was investigating the father—although it didn’t feel right to think of him that way—in their last foster home, but that they hadn’t reached a conclusion yet. “I’m sorry—”
Farrah stepped between Greg and me. “There’s an older boy in the group home. It was about to happen again. I’m not stupid. So Greg said we had to go.”
I heard clanging from the front end of the car. “I can understand that.” Better than she knew, thanks to a drunken lout from the Tarleton rodeo team. He got a feel of my breasts and a knee to the balls. I was maybe thirty pounds heavier than her, though, and seven inches taller. Suddenly, I understood her vulnerability in a way that I hadn’t when I’d heard her story third person from Wallace. “But where will you go?”
Greg moved forward, too. Both of them were so close I could have touched their cheeks. “We’ll be fine. I can take care of her.”
A sharpness rent my chest. “Let me help you.”
“You can’t. No one can.”
“I can try.”
Farrah smiled with her mouth only. “Thank you. Really. It’s . . .” She trailed off.
I gestured toward the backseat. “Hop in, where it’s warm.”
Both kids took a step back, then another, as the boy shook his head. “We wanted to see if you were okay. We have to get out of here.”
“Wait! At least take my card. It has my office number and my cell number. Call me if you need anything, please.”
I pulled a card from the outer side pocket of my handbag, where I’d learned to stash them for easy access. People in need of a criminal attorney were often in a hurry to get someplace else, it seemed. The card had the addresses for both the Amarillo and New Mexico offices for Jack’s firm. I stuck it out the window. Snow fell and melted on my bare hand. The wind flapped the edge of my wrap, and I held on to the flimsy cardstock with a tight grip between thumb and forefinger.
Greg leapt forward and snatched the card, then retreated just as quickly. The two kids took another step back and the snow and the night swallowed them whole.
Jack hopped back in the car, letting in a gust of icy air and swath of falling snow with him. “You hit some kind of concrete stanchion.”
“I’m so sorry. I’ll pay for the repairs.”
“No need.” His lip twitched. “It didn’t even dent the bumper.”
For a moment, his words didn’t make sense. Greg said the front end was “wasted” and I’d heard a clanging. Then a warm glow spread from my chest outward as I realized that Jack was pretending I hadn’t caused any damage, and I could only guess it was to keep me from paying for repairs. A truly kind gesture, given the state of my finances, which he knew all about. I played along. “Really? Wow. We hit the concrete so hard.”
He stomped his boots on the floorboard. “Lucky break.”
The glow spread further, grew hotter. “Did you see the kids?”
“No, sorry.”
“No, I mean, they were right here, at my window. Didn’t you hear me scream?”
“I didn’t hear a thing except the wind.” He craned to see out my side. “I don’t see anyone now.”
As hard as I stared into the darkness and swirling snow after them, I didn’t either.
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